South Park: The Fractured But Whole’s Director Talks Tactical Combat, Working With Matt and Trey, Animation and More; Full Q&A

Twinfinite recently had the chance to look at South Park: The Fractured But Whole and sit down with the game’s director, Jason Schroeder. The new title looks to enhance and improve upon nearly every aspect of the previous game, Stick of Truth, even boasting a drastically different combat system. We did our best to get as much South Park info as we could, right down to how involved Matt Stone and Trey Parker were on the project. Of course, some info is still being kept close to the chest by Ubisoft, but let’s go ahead and jump right in to the full Q&A. 

South Park: The Fractured But Whole – New Combat System and Story

Hayes Madsen from Twinfinite: What Made You Want to Go From Traditional JRPG combat to a more tactical approach with South Park: The Fractured But Whole?

Jason Schroeder, Game Director of South Park: The Fractured But Whole:  Early on when we were starting to have meetings with Matt and Trey, they were talking about what they liked about the last game. They liked the turn-based combat, there were parts of it that had evolved throughout the whole development and all that, but ultimately they were like it was the right choice for delivering jokes, for having a lot of their fans be able to handle the game without being master gamers. When they started talking about things they wanted to improve they felt that there was a disconnection in the gameplay, in the cutscenes, and the exploration, and they wanted to make all of that much more seamless.

What that meant was, we want to have those turn-based combats in the spaces that we’re exploring, so no more cutting away to a slightly different version of the environment. And so we started exploring that, started prototyping that, and then pretty quickly it was like now we kind of end up in this bizarre space where I’m walking around in this Raisins dining room and I have full control, and then all the sudden I can’t move, and it feels weird. So okay let’s add movement, but keep [the gameplay] turn-based, and then you’re making a tactics game [laugh].

Twinfinite: So it was more about making a realistic space where the battles take place?

Schroeder: It was trying to create something that felt seamless, and something that the kids could believably make up the rules to. And so, from there though, we obviously brought a lot of what we know as game developers and as game players, but you know Matt and Trey are game developers now as well, and game players. Trey plays a lot of tabletop games and he was drawing a lot of inspiration from his D&D campaigns that he runs, and other tabletop sort of RPG games. Matt’s direction is always you know  ‘I don’t want to be overwhelmed by a bunch of menus,  I just wanna keep it simple, don’t distract me from the comedy.’ And that’s kind of the tightrope that we walked.

Twinfinite: With the superhero theme, is there any kind of sidekick and hero dynamic that’s going to play into the story of South Park: The Fractured But Whole?

Schroeder: In this game, Cartman has kind of positioned himself to kind of be essentially the dungeon master of the superhero game, and he gets to make the calls of okay ‘You’re popular enough for our franchise that maybe you can qualify to be somebody’s sidekick.’ And always Cartman is going to try to make sure that he doesn’t compliment you so much that you seem cooler than his character, The Coon. But pretty quickly you just start to realize, I guess I’m kind of the one with real super powers here, I can actually do these farts, I can actually fart so bad that it bends time, whereas all the other kids are kind of playing make believe.

Twinfinite: I noticed the equipment system has changed a bit, you can equip items and change your look, but it doesn’t affect your stats in any way. What was the decision behind moving away from putting on different kinds of gear, and putting on artifacts?

Schroeder: The reason for it is twofold. One in a superhero world, the way a superhero looks is a lot of their brand, it’s really externally speaking, the kids are worried about their superhero franchise, they’re worried about getting followers for Coon and Friends. If all of the superheroes that players created, all kind of ended up looking like the same kid’s version of Iron Man, at the end I felt like people wouldn’t have had the opportunity to build their superhero brand the way they wanted. So I wanted people to be able to create a superhero that reflects them, and when they’re standing next to Cartman, and Kenny, and the kids of South Park, they’d kind of be able to reflect themselves and say yeah I’m playing this game with these kids.

The other part of it was just, besides wanting you to feel like your own character in South Park, was honestly give a visual variety to streamers, people that play, people that share footage online. I didn’t want all of the Fractured footage to necessarily look the same, I thought it’d be cool to see how people reflected themselves in the public as well.

Twinfinite: It looks like the side quests are a little more fleshed out this time than in Stick of Truth. Was there an intent this time to make side quests a little more substantial in Fractured But Whole?

Schroeder:  Well I think that in some ways we found in Stick, and in early play tests of Fractured, that people just loved to live in South Park. They like to see what’s behind that person’s bedroom door. So just trying to give people something to do that’s not on the mainline of the superhero story. I feel like there’s always more that you will want, but I’m glad that it’s starting to feel like there’s more to do.

Twinfinite: And you can go out at night now, right? How is night time going to change the town and how you interact with it?

Schroeder: So obviously you’re the same new kid in the same small town, so believably we couldn’t rearrange the whole town. We did the same thing the show does, we changed some buildings here and there some people come and go. But night gave us the opportunity to show a different side of South Park. Batman doesn’t really have Gotham without Gotham at night, and so the Coon, Cartman’s superhero persona, he and Mysterion both take their superheroing very seriously, and so that means they feel like they have to do night missions, that you have to do night missions if you’re going to be a serious superhero crime fighter. And so that I think allows people to see a different kind of South Park. In this case a South Park where adults are getting wasted.

Which to kids, you might remember what that was like as a kid, but it’s kind of baffling that adults act so different some nights. What Matt and Trey were trying to convey I think was that from the eyes of these kids playing superheroes it’s like ‘Wow, something is behind this, someone must be mind controlling, or something must be happening to the adults.’

 South Park: The Fractured But Whole – Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Animation

Twinfinite: How involved were Matt and Trey in the gameplay design of Fractured But Whole? They wrote the story of course, but how involved are they in the nitty and gritty of gameplay design?

Schroeder: Well, in some ways they’re kind of like our game’s creative directors. They don’t necessarily get involved with the data itself, but when we proposed that we want to do something with all of this looting, and really crafting is kind of the base thing when you’re gathering resources like that, crafting becomes the next logical step. And so again they’re like ‘okay that’s cool,’ but then we start talking about different ways you can execute that, and then we ended up going with something that is, you know,  you just open up your phone menu and you can craft from there. So we don’t need to always fast travel back to some crafting station or something like that, just keeping it light.

Twinfinite: Working with the humor of South Park, are there any times where you have not cross a line, you just kind of have to evaluate, in terms of how video games are rated, are there things you have to say “We can’t do that” with Matt and Trey.

Schroeder: [Laughs] When you work in games I guess you start to become a worry wart about that kind of stuff, but I shut all that off. The biggest thing was trying to make something authentic to what they want to do. They know their series at this point, they know how to get away with so much more now than they did at the beginning. With their feature film they tested what it means to get across the movie ratings board. And when they made their musical, I think they realized that there’s no one reading musicals and they went crazy with it. I think that they’ve learned to walk that line, and for me it was just really trying to make sure that Ubisoft would never be responsible for having censored them. We just put it all in [laugh].

Twinfinite: The way you animate the game, was there anything that changed about it when you made the jump to Xbox One and PS4?

Schroeder: When we were setting out, we wanted to create a process that was going to capture the iteration style that Matt and Trey were used to. So South Park Studios; they work in a program called Maya, for all of their characters, animation, and backgrounds. We decided to adopt the same tech, so that basically the South Park Studios team became an arm of the development team, they were part of our art team essentially. Even though they were making characters, animating cutscenes, and making backgrounds, we were able to then take those and with a bit of processing ingest them into Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine. That’s an entirely different engine, an entirely different pipeline to create Fractured. That really did enable us to create I think a game that looks perfectly like the show, without any sort of barrier, because it’s literally the show assets running within the game.

Twinfinite: When you look back, was there anything you wanted to fix or to work on from the first game?

Schroeder: For me, I mean I was a fan on the first one, I didn’t contribute to it in any major way. What South Park learned from it was that early on they knew that they needed to be involved in the process and be responsible for the writing, but also be responsible for reviewing those gameplay ideas, and be responsible for how is the story going to really interact with the gameplay and acknowledge that. I think they embraced it, and they also embraced that their studio isn’t going to just be the cutscene house, it became a co-development instead of a licensing partnership. 

South Park: The Fractured But Whole –  Delays and Appealing to All Kinds of Fans

Twinfinite: What did the extra time with the delay allow you to do with South Park: The Fractured But Whole?

Schroeder: When it comes to that extra time, I think it was just to make sure that we made something that everyone was proud of. Like when we were first evaluating the original launch date, the amount of compromise that was going to be necessary was more than Ubisoft wanted to take, it was more than South Park was comfortable with. It was really an easy choice to just say if we want to make a game that everyone is proud of then we just need this time. You’ll see stuff that’s shown up, that’s just shown up in the last few months honestly, because they’re always writing and iterating. We built a pipeline that was trying to capture that same sort of iteration and ‘current’ energy.

Twinfinite: With Ubisoft lately, the company has had some big partnerships, like South Park and Mario+Rabbids. Going forward what do those partnerships mean for your team first of all, and Ubisoft as a whole?

Schroeder: For Ubisoft San Francisco it was, I think we approached the relationship with South Park with the humbleness of: this is a team that at that time had been working for nearly 20 years on a show, and we knew this is a team that has figured out how to work together, how to produce a show in six days, how to get the most out of a creative talent like Trey Parker. Rather than taking for granted that we that know how that works, we came into it with the humbleness of trying to learn from that, and this is what it means to be able to be great creators. I think everyone at our studio has had an opportunity to see what that creative process is like, and set the compromise that is required, to craft comedy into an interactive experience. I think you can take a lot of stuff for granted like in terms of ‘oh games are done in this order, you make your prototype, get to your alpha, this is how games get made,’ and a lot of those rules get thrown out when you’re trying to refine a joke. All the sudden cameras matter way more than, you know, the feel of movement.

Twinfinite: Do you think that South Park: The Fractured But Whole is a good place to start for people to kind of learn about the South Park series, if they aren’t fans of it?

Schroeder: [Laughs] Absolutely, if you don’t know South Park you’ll be able to just get into it and enjoy a unique game experience. I think if you don’t know games, and you know South Park, you can also come in and we’ll take you through how to play, and with our more casual combat challenge setting you’ll just be able to have fun and watch the kids pull of some crazy moves.

I think if you’ve never watched an episode of South Park, it’s probably going to be super shocking. [Laughs] I think those of us that have watched it for decades are just like oh yeah this is South Park, and you just accept a certain level of shock. I’ve had an opportunity over the last couple of years to have a few people that were unaware of what South Park really is or has become. Getting [them] to see the demos or see some stuff and just being like ‘oh my.’ Like, oh yeah sorry I kind thought you knew what you were getting into here.

Twinfinite: From here are there any kind of plans for follow up content or expansions for Fractured But Whole? Where does the team go from here?

Schroeder: We have a season pass that’s announced, like the show we’re gonna hold it close until we know exactly what episodes should be like. But we’re gonna keep trying to tell more superhero stories. There are a few jokes that are already kind of rolling around, and yeah everyone can look forward to some more.

Twinfinite: Any final thoughts?

Schroeder: I’m just really looking forward to everybody getting an opportunity to play what I think is the funniest game ever made. It’s a huge South Park story, just hours and hours of what I think is a relatively grown up South Park story.